FSR November 2022

SUBURBAN SPRAWL

About a month after the Battle of Broad Street, Harvey’s teamed up with a local pie purveyor to host a Dog Days of Summer beauty pageant, which dou bled as an adoption event and fundraiser for an area animal shelter. It’s community events like these that continue to affirm the chef ’s decision to open his restaurant/market in the D.C. suburb of Falls Church. Competitions and fundraisers not only drum up traf fic for Harvey’s, which just debuted in March, they also weave the business into the community fabric and charac ter. As the chef puts it, “I have that kind of feel here.” And that overall feeling works well with his ultimate vision for the restaurant to be a central gathering spot, which he describes as the televi sion show “Cheers” meets a general store. “It needs to be a neighborhood place and really become a local haunt. I like those weird, funky places where peo ple come to visit from out of town, [and you say], ‘We’ve got to go here; you’ve got nothing like it back where you are.’ I love those kinds of places,” Harvey says. He adds that it can be difficult for the sub urbs to achieve such a status but Falls Church is on its way. And he’s grateful to be on the ground level. “Every box I was looking for, Falls Church just ticks it off,” Harvey says. “I think it’s going to start growing and put ting itself on the map. ” SUBURBIA’S STAYING POWER Establishments like Harvey’s—which was voted Best New Restaurant by Falls Church News-Press and garnered buzz from Eater and Washingtonian maga zine—are challenging the suburbs’ long standing ho-hum reputation. Since the 1950s, city-dwellers have migrated away from urban centers to quieter environments at an accelerat ing rate. According to the Pew Research Center, population growth in large sub urban counties has increased by 25 per cent since 2000—significantly out pacing urban growth at 16 percent. Additional data indicates that Covid has only increased suburban appeal; in 2018, nearly a quarter of Americans (23

percent) preferred city life, but by 2021, it was down to 19 percent. Within this time frame, a desire to live in the sub urbs grew from 42 to 46 percent. But while the draw of the suburbs remains as strong as ever, consumers’ willingness to part with big city ame nities has faltered. Restaurant owners, chefs, and other industry workers are also increasingly attracted to suburbia, which offers respite and untapped busi ness opportunities. For Preston Lancaster, market data has informed the locations of his various restaurants—but so have gut feel and personal perspective. His business, 33 Restaurant Group, has a half dozen con cepts sprinkled around the greater Dal las area, ranging from the larger suburb of Plano to Southlake—a community with less than 35,000 residents. When he was laying the groundwork

CHEF THOMAS HARVEY (CENTER) SAYS LOCAL EVENTS LIKE THE BATTLE OF BROAD STREET ARE AMONG THE MANY PERKS TO LIVING IN THE SUBURBS.

for his group, Lancaster, who hails from Texas but now calls Southern California home, reflected onwhat he and his peers wouldwant to find in these satellite cities. “We had a unique perspective in that we lived in the suburbs. We were prob ably the demographic that we were try ing to appeal to as restaurateurs,” he

says. At the time, Lancaster and his busi ness partners were in their early to mid 30s with young families, which also hap pened to be their target audience. “We asked ourselves, and it sounds really simple and obvious, but, what do we want? What’s missing in this area? You have all these homes, you have all

BUTCHER PHOTOGRAPHY (5)

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FSRMAGAZINE .COM

NOVEMBER 2022